The Google Business Profile checklist we run every 30 days.
Local ranking is not a one-time setup. The map pack rewards recency and activity, which means a profile that was perfect eighteen months ago is now losing to a competitor who posts once a fortnight.
The monthly pass
Primary category. The single highest-leverage field on the entire profile, and the one most businesses get wrong. It should describe what you are, not what you also do. Check what your top-three map-pack competitors use. Change it and watch rankings move within days — in both directions, so change one thing at a time.
Secondary categories. Add every one that genuinely applies. Remove any that do not — irrelevant categories dilute relevance rather than adding reach.
Services and descriptions. List every service as its own entry with its own description. This is free, structured, first-party text that Google reads. Almost nobody fills it in completely.
Photos, monthly. Geotagged where honest, dated, and showing the actual premises and work. Recency is a signal. Ten photos uploaded in one burst two years ago is not the same as one per week.
Posts, fortnightly. Offers, events, updates. They expire, which is precisely the point — the profile that keeps posting looks alive.
Q&A. Seed the real questions your sales team answers on the phone every week, and answer them from the business account. Then monitor: anyone can post an answer to your Q&A, including a competitor, and the wrong answer will sit there for years if nobody looks.
Review velocity. Not review count — velocity. A steady trickle beats a burst. Reply to all of them, including the good ones, within a week.
The two things that actually move the needle
In our experience, the primary category and review velocity account for most of the movement we see. The rest is hygiene — necessary, but it will not save a profile in the wrong category.
What not to do
Do not keyword-stuff the business name. It works, briefly, and then you get suspended and lose the profile entirely — along with every review on it. We have picked up clients whose previous agency did this. Recovering a suspended profile takes months, and sometimes it does not happen at all.